Discipline

Book synopsis

Ann Banfield – professor in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley – is best known for her groundbreaking contributions to narrative theory. Working within the paradigm of generative linguistics, she argued that the language of fiction is characterized by two «unspeakable sentences», i.e., sentences that do not properly occur in the spoken language: the sentence of «pure narration» and the sentence of «represented speech and thought» (style indirect libre or erlebte Rede). More recently, Banfield offered a major reconsideration of the novels of Virginia Woolf and modernism in light of the philosophy of knowledge developed by G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and appropriated by Roger Fry in his critical analyses of impressionism and post-impressionism. The essays gathered here pay tribute to Banfield by addressing those disciplines and topics most closely related to her work, including: narrative theory and pragmatics, the philosophy of language and knowledge, generative syntax, meter and phonology, and modernism.

About the author(s)/editor(s)

The Editors: Robert S. Kawashima is assistant professor at the University of Florida in the Department of Religion and the Center for Jewish Studies. Gilles Philippe is professor of French Literature and French Linguistics at Stendhal University in Grenoble. Thelma Sowley is retired from the English Department of the University of Paris VIII, where she taught linguistics and poetics.